I left the Navy to see the world
Around the world in 357 days.
Another chapter in my youthful adventures. Backpacking!
– 1988 to 1989 –
During my last few weeks in the Navy, I knew I could leave at any time, but I was having such a good time with my friends and with my treble Glenfiddich every night with Craig that I stuck around until the last possible moment.
Every day, in class, I sketched the same map of the world, and fantasised about the journey I was about to embark on. On my last day, Her Majesty the Queen came to see us and to say goodbye, and I drove home after six years in the Royal Navy.
That summer happened to be the 400th anniversary of our victory over the Spanish Armada, so I spent a few days driving around a bunch of little villages in the South of England, all celebrating the Armada around their beacons, and I stopped for a beer and some sausage rolls at each. When I got home, I bought my round-the-world ticket, a backpack, a harmonica and The Golden Treasury of English Verse and boarded my plane to America.
For all my dreaming, I hadn’t really done much planning. All I knew was that I was flying to Los Angeles. I hadn’t even looked at a map.
Here’s what happened next (details to follow).
French Polynesia
Australia
Indonesia
Singapore
Malaysia
Thailand
I made it back to England after a year, absolutely broke, and set about finding myself a job.
If you liked this little story, you can find more memories here:
All About Me
My kids might be interested, but why would anyone else want to read my memoirs? Well, I’ve had a pretty interesting life.
I "did time" in L.A. from ages 9 to 24. Never liked anything about it except that I got to have a horse and go on trail rides (my folks let me borrow the family station wagon and pull the hand made open horse trailer built on a single axle from a 1940s car) with my horse and that of the adult woman riding companion my parents insisted on, her horse and mine, over L.A. freeways and out to the desert, Apple Valley, Joshua Tree on trail rides starting as soon as I got my driver's license. Looking back, I can hardly believe that, but they had that kind of faith in me and I never let them down. I went thru undergrad and grad school at UCLA, so I know the turf you described. My family lived in Westchester which became the LAX ghost town as LAX kept expanding its runways. So my eyes bulged half out of my head when I read that you WALKED from LAX to Santa Monica. Holy S--t! Nobody walks anywhere in L.A. to the best of my knowledge, then or now.